The practice of maternity entitlements, although in rudimentary forms, has been documented from the late nineteenth century in colonial India. They were often a result of the concern over the prevalent high maternal and child mortality, which in the colonial imagination, stemmed from the indigenous health practices and the ignorance of the natives. The remedial measures were sought in the introduction of maternity welfare, which included ‘pregnant leave’ to plantation workers, maternity hospitals, emphasis on women doctors; etc. The legislative attempts to introduce maternity benefits, however, were started only in the late 1920s, especially as a repercussion of the Maternity Protection Convention of 1919 and the process was accelerated after the Royal Commission on Labour (1929-31). This was also a period, when India was undergoing tremendous administrative changes, with the introduction of diarchy in 1919 that shifted the arenas of public health and industries to the hands of the Indian legislators, which might have induced these developments. Trade unions and women’s organisations also developed significant interest in the conditions of women's labour in this period and advocated for various maternity entitlements including paid maternity leave for industrial workers. They tended to associate motherhood with larger goals like nation-building and imagined maternity benefits as instrumental for that purpose. This paper traces the history of legislating maternity benefits in this period and argues that the genesis of these legislations lies at the juncture of improving the conditions of maternal and child health, and the dreams of building a healthy and prosperous nation.

Inspired by Anthias (2020) and Erel & Reynolds (2018), my presentation is about hybrid motherhood shaped by migrant mothers' negotiations between, on the one hand, two ideals of motherhood, one from their old homeland and the other from their new homeland, and on the other hand, the actual conditions of life and the actual needs of the children that affect their priority in the new homeland. The presentation is based on a study of mothers who have been residing in Sweden for several years and have a background in a post-Soviet country in Central Asia and the Caucasian region (including the Russian Federation).

While the transition to parenthood is well researched, less is known about later stages of life. However, becoming a mother or father does not only have short-term effects. Instead, the birth of a child sets the course for future, and has long-term gender differentiating consequences: child-related care practices as well as the distribution of care and paid work tasks interweave the life courses of mothers and children. Though, over time tasks, roles, and self-perceptions (have to) change.

Against this background, we conducted a comparative, interpretative analysis of interviews with mothers who reflect in the so-called empty nest upon their prior life as parent. This reveals differences in three respects: (1) how they make sense of the lived temporality of motherhood in relation to dynamic care needs over their life course, (2) how they deal with the experienced fluctuation and pluralism of motherhood linked to the ageing of children and the decreasing need to ‘mother’, and (3) how they position themselves in relation to the ideals and images of ‘good motherhood’ with which they are confronted through discourses and in everyday life. Homogenous and static ideas of motherhood, an essentialisation of motherhood, an ignorance of historical and biographical change and stereotypical ideas of grieving mothers in the empty nest appear to be dominant. The mothers interviewed resist these negative and one-dimensional images, realise a good post-active-motherhood-life and actualise new, age-appropriate ways of mothering.